THE PASSENGER by Mieczyslaw Weinberg

In Russian, German, Polish, French, Yiddish, Czech, and English with projected English texts Approximate running time: 2hrs, 55 min

There’s no escaping your past.

Aboard an ocean liner in the early 1960s, a West German diplomat, Walter, and his wife Liese are bound for a new posting in Brazil. But unbeknownst to her husband, Liese served as an SS officer in Auschwitz. Haunted by her past, she is stunned when she thinks she recognizes a fellow passenger; is it really Marta, her former prisoner?

Suppressed for more than 40 years, Weinberg’s gripping opera has emerged anew, electrifying audiences at Austria’s Bregenz Festival and again in Warsaw and London. The action moves between two realms — from the pristine white deck of a luxury liner above to the dark horrors of the death camp below.

Guilt and denial, lies and truth, fear and courage, and love — it’s all here in an artistic and emotional experience you’ll never forget.

“Music of beauty and enormity…it is a perfect masterpiece…it is a hymn to humanity…to the international solidarity of those who, subjected to the most terrible evil, stood up against fascism.” Dmitri Shostakovich

– See more at: https://www.lyricopera.org/passenger/